Dissecting learning: combining experimental and computational approaches

A longstanding question in psychology concerns the representational content of learning: what information is learned from experience? Consider a trial-and-error decision task such as an animal foraging for food or a human practicing chess. An early behaviorist proposal, due to Thorndike, was that such learning is limited to action propensities. On this view, successful actions (those followed by reward) are stamped in or reinforced as stimulus-response habits, and more likely to be repeated later. The refutation of this narrow view of action animated the cognitive revolution. Tolman, for instance, argued that organisms are not doomed merely to repeat previously successful behaviors, but can learn about the structure of a task (a "cognitive map"